Severe acute respiratory syndrome: a vanished evil?

The year 2013, the 10^th anniversary of epidemics of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an evil that has swept the world leading to significant death tools and rendered global alert, heralds an emerging era of prevention and treatment against viral communicable diseases. SARS has, unlike avian or swan influenza (1), vanished from the public perspective with exception of scattered cases reported in 2004 (2). This seems reasonable to lead us to assume that global alert of potential epidemics, with well-practised protocols for disease management, is anything but necessary.